Retailers are being squeezed. They are being squeezed by high commodity prices, high transportation costs, high labor costs, and the high cost of advertising inside and outside of their retail centers. Retailers now, more than ever, are having their profit margins decimated by events far beyond their control. Importantly, retailers, which control their own retail space, need to optimize use of that space in ways that include keen shopper understanding. Such shopper understanding is costly to obtain and is often incomplete. For example, the collection of shopper buying habits is known to be acquired at the point of sale. Such data collection is widespread but fails to provide granular insight as to a shopper's behavior, namely the reasons a shopper chooses a particular product for purchase. Today, other than following shoppers in a store with one or more persons skilled and trained at conducting focus group testing, the ability to gain shopper insights at the point of decision is lacking.
Grocery stores are among those hardest hit, since their profit margins are often no more than one to two percent of a store's total sales. Currently, stores boost their profit margins by selling shelf space within the store like real estate. To increase the price of shelf space in stores and to encourage a greater variety of products within stores, stores need to provide vendors of wholesale products with a more effective and influential way of selling their products to the store's shoppers. Stores need a way to offer vendors effective systems and methods to influence shoppers at the first moment of truth, allowing the vendors and retail establishments to sell more products. Vendors will pay premiums to stores employing such systems and methods.
Shoppers, too, are feeling the pinch of ever escalating commodity prices like crude oil, corn, and others. As a result, shoppers have become increasingly cost conscious of their monthly food bills. Yet, today's modern lifestyles do not provide shoppers the luxury of time to spend searching and cutting out coupons or other saving mechanisms typically offered by retailers. Therefore, shoppers need a way to make shopping easier, quicker and cheaper.
Currently, retailers attempt to influence shoppers before, during, and after a shopper's product consideration by advertising products within the retail establishment over the in-store speakers, through elaborate displays, fixed print advertisements attached to shopping carts, weekly circular ads provided to shoppers as they enter the store, and electronic tags located on shelves displaying products. These methods are inefficient and often result in higher costs to the store, which is passed on to the customers.
Therefore, what is needed is a low cost, highly effective and highly reliable in-store system for tracking, analyzing, and responding to a shopper's product decision-making. It is important that such systems and methods serve to enhance, simplify, and expedite a shopper's experience with very little, if any, cost pass-through to shoppers and very little, if any, negative impact to a store's profit margin. This has been achieved through one or more of the embodiments described below and will now be explained with greater detail and particularity.